A hearing-impaired person with hearing loss of 100 dB or more in both ears (hereinafter, simply “hearing-impaired person”) will be virtually incapable of understanding spoken linguistic information in speech even with hearing aids or the like. It has thus conventionally been the case that when a hearing-impaired person attends a lecture, school classes or the like, a sign language interpreter or a note-taking interpreter would be provided.
Of these, when a note-taking interpreter is provided, two or more note-taking interpreters are usually provided for every hearing-impaired person in the case of school classes, for example. These note-takers use a PC (personal computer), a paper notebook or the like to transcribe what the teacher is saying and so on, and present this transcription to the hearing-impaired person. Two or more note-taking interpreters are needed because note-taking is demanding work and the accuracy of the summary tends to suffer with one person.
A survey conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2008 found that in Japan there are approximately 20,000 hearing-impaired students aged 18 and under, whereas the number of note-taking interpreters that are formally registered is approximately 10,000. On that basis, assuming that two or more note-taking interpreters are provided for every hearing-impaired student, a simple calculation indicates that only a quarter of all hearing-impaired students are able to receive assistance. Furthermore, there are regional differences in the number of note-takers and the number of hearing-impaired students. For these reasons, the current reality is that only a very small number of hearing-impaired students can receive assistance at school.
In view of this, various organizations are involved in training and the like in order to increase the number of note-taking interpreters, with new note-taking interpreters being registered as note-takers after having developed their skills with a year of mandatory courses and training, and the like. However, there is a problem in that the number of note-takers has only increased marginally, and thus there are still many hearing-impaired students who cannot receive assistance.
Patent Documents 1 and 2 disclose systems that assist transcribers when writing captions. The systems disclosed in Patent Documents 1 and 2 are provided with a function of adjusting the reproduction speed of speech and a function of automatically combining text data that is input by a captionist with video data. It is thought that such systems could also contribute to resolving the problem of insufficient numbers of note-taking interpreters.
Patent Document 3 discloses a system in which speech recognition is performed on speech during a presentation, with the recognition results being corrected in real time and the corrected recognition results being displayed as captions. It is thought that implementing the system disclosed in Patent Document 3 could certainly contribute to resolving the problem of insufficient numbers of note-taking interpreters.